I have argued for the endless growth of the Kingdom of God. But what about the "last day" and the resurrection? To answer that I need to get some help from Einstein, Relativity and how a day can be a 1000 years and a 1000 years a day....

There are some interesting debates among Christians with regard to the resurrection and what happens when you die. There are some scriptures that seem to indicate that you sleep in death waiting for the resurrection...

Dan 12:2 "And many if them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt."

Paul repeats this idea in 1 Thes. 4: 14...."For we believe that Jesus died and rose again even so them that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him...and the dead in Christ shall rise first...."

And then Jesus says 4 times in John chapter 6 that He will raise up the dead in the last day. (Jn. 6:39,40,44, 54).

And then other scriptures Paul seems to indicate that when we die we are with the Lord in heaven...
2 Cor. 5:8 "We are of good courage I say and are willing to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord."

Which by the way is exactly what Jesus told the thief on the cross....
Luke 23:43 "Today you shall be with me in paradise."

So what is the answer when we die...
Do we sleep in the ground waiting for the resurrection some time in the future?
Or do we close our eyes in death and open them immediately in paradise?
If Jesus said He will raise us up "in the last day" how can He tell the thief that day he will be with Him in paradise? Why not tell the thief, "Hey fellow don't worry one day in the resurrection I will come to get you....but go to sleep now in peace."

What makes this even more intriguing is that Paul indicates that even now while we are in this body on earth our spirit man is now presently seated with Christ in heavenly places.

And then there are the numerous testimonies of those who have died and gone to heaven and come back to tell the wonderful stories of what is now going on heaven. All seem to indicate that they were met by their loved ones, everyone alive and having a wonderful time already in paradise. Nobody seems to be asleep in the ground waiting for the resurrection. For them it seems to have already happened!

So what is going on here? Time travel? Dreams? False visions? Contradictions in the Bible?

Let me see if I can clarify this time anomaly for you and hopefully not confuse you further. I will need to ask assistance from Albert Einstein and his weird discoveries about time in his famous "Theory of Special Relativity" of 1905.

Before I do so please be aware that Jesus warned His disciples "I have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now. But when He the Spirit of truth is come He will guide you into all truth..." (John 16:12-13)

I think one of the things that the disciples were not ready to hear in 33 AD was Relativity Theory and the elasticity of time. And when Einstein first postulated it in 1905 most people did not believe it...but it changed the world and how we view time and the nature of reality.

Basically this is how weird the idea of Relativity is....

You stand on earth and watch your friend in say a new tech rocket ship. The faster that your friend flies in the rocket the slower time becomes for him relative to you...but inside the rocket time seems to go on as normal. Einstein's ground breaking idea was this...time is relative. It is not absolute. It varies depending on how fast you are moving. The faster you move the slower time becomes. Weird? No wonder Jesus told His fishing buddies Peter James and John, Look guys there are some really weird things about how I made this world that you are not going to understand now....

So here is a practical example of how this time dilation works and then I want to apply it to the resurrection, the earth world and the spirit world....

If your friend in his special rocket ship travels at 75% of the speed of light and comes back to you in 2 months time, the clock on his rocket will show that for him only 1 month has passed by.

If he now goes out and really speeds up to 99,9% of the speed of light and he flies back in 10 years time, that is 10 years for you, but the clock on his ship shows that only 30 days have gone by.

Now the clincher: If he really revs up the afterburners and travels at 99,999999% of the speed of light he would have travelled to the centre of our galaxy 27,000 light years away but the clock on his rocket will show that only 27 days have gone by but for you on earth 27,000 years would have gone by....

And that is how 1 day becomes as a 1000 years and 1000 years as a day.....

It all depends on how fast you are moving relative to those who are not moving at all.

But now here is an important fact that Einstein predicted in his Relativity Theory:
Nothing physical or made of matter can move either faster or at the speed of light. You can move faster and faster approaching the speed of light and as you do so time will go slower and slower until at the speed of light time as we know it stands still...there is no more time.

But for the person in the speeding rocket time seems normal....
But for those on earth time stretches to infinity while the person in the rocket time is no more.

But is this just all mathematical fantasies of Einstein who may have been smoking something strange in his famous pipe?

Actually it was only in recent years that this idea of "time dilation" could actually be proved to be true. Scientists were able to manufacture the world's most accurate clock using the atomic decay of Caesium atoms. They put one clock on a Jumbo Jet flying around the world and calibrated it to another clock sitting still in the lab. They did the same with a clock on the space shuttle and another in the lab on earth. They measured the time on the clocks in the lab with those that had flown in the jet and in the space shuttle. Einstein was right...time moves slower for those travelling faster even though they do not notice it.

Now let me apply Einstein's theory of relativity to earth, heaven and the resurrection.

God is light (but remember...light is not God!).

Everything in the spirit realm moves at or faster than the speed of light.

Everything in the earth or the universe physical realm moves at speeds less than the speed of light.

Therefore everything and everyone in the physical universe is subject to time.

But heaven and the spirit world works on a reality that transcends any notion of time as we know it.

So here is what seems to be our time line from our perspective of the resurrection and the last day...

We have from our perspective on earth the idea that time ends at some point and that is the last day...time is no more and now all mankind is finished on earth and earth is destroyed and there is a new heavens and a new earth and everyone is either in heaven or in hell.

Now here is an alternate view using Relativity Theory applied to the difference between the earth realm of matter and the spirit realm of light.

Every person experiences the resurrection when they die....
They move from the limits of physical time and space and into the spirit realm of timeless eternity.

From our time perspective they are "asleep" .................................................... There is no end
From their perspective they are in the resurrection.
In the physical realm of space and time there is no end to either space or time.

In the spirit realm Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

That is why the Kingdom of God can grow forever because in this physical universe of trillions of galaxies and billions of years there is no limit to the amount of the growth of new children and families and the expansion of time and eternity. And when they have finished their earthly work they are to transition to the heavenlies.

But the spirit realm transcends our ideas of space and time and there is a beginning and an end...which we cannot now comprehend.

That is why we who are in Christ have already passed from death unto life and are now seated with Christ in heavenly places.

That is why the thief on the cross was with Christ in paradise "that day" which was also the "last day" when Jesus said He would resurrect the dead....

That is why he went down to Sheol when He died on the cross and led captivity captive and rose from the dead...and you and I by the way rose with Him on that day...try to wrap your mind and around that idea!

That is also why the works we are called to do have been accomplished from the foundation of the earth....and now all we have to do is to walk in them (which is why you get that "déjà vu" feeling every now and then of Hey I remember this!).

Now some of you clever theologians are already arguing with me and saying Ok I see your point maybe about a continuous resurrection of the dead that transcends time...but what about we who remain alive when Christ shall appear and are to be changed in the twinkling of an eye and to meet Him in the air...that does not fit in with your resurrection theory! Ah now that is a fascinating discussion all on its own...I will leave it for another series of blogs one day!

In the meantime my prayer of praise...

How great O Lord are all thy works from eternity...I rest in you and what you have already done for me in Christ!